"Beam me up, Scotty:" Demystifying the Quantum World

Our fifth season of "Science Straight Up" kicks off with Dr. Michael Wasielewski of Northwestern University talking about the basics of quantum theory and how it will change our lives.  We can't beam people aboard the starship just yet, but teleportation of information using quantum techniques is happening right now. Many of us have heard about quantum computers and some of the amazing things that they will do, literally a “quantum leap” in performance. However, this is not the whole story. The quantum world and innovative technologies being developed from it will significantly enhance secure communications and be capable of sensing single atoms and molecules, even when they are within living cells. How does this work? Dr Wasielewski has some answers.  Our session was moderated by veteran broadcast journalists Judy Muller and George Lewis.

Transcript

Science Straight Up—Season 5, episode 1

“Beam me up, Scotty”—Demystifying the Quantum World

Dr. Michael Wasielewski—Northwestern University

Hosts: Judy Muller and George Lewis

(THEME MUSIC)

(JUDY) From Telluride Science…it’s Science Straight Up

(GEORGE) And on this episode….

(“STAR TREK” AUDIO) Scotty…beam me up! (transporter sound effect)

(GEORGE) Teleportation.  It actually exists in the quantum world, within limits.  There’s no way yet to teleport people or other complex objects, but it is possible to teleport the characteristics of tiny quantum particles over long distances. I’m George Lewis

(JUDY) And I’m Judy Muller. Our discussion of the quantum world kicks off the fifth season of our podcast.  Every year, Telluride Science brings together prominent researchers from all over the world for a series of workshops, seminars and brainstorming sessions to discuss ideas on the leading edge of scientific discovery.

(GEORGE) The participants also share these ideas with the local community in what they call “Town Talks”. This one features Dr. Michael Wasielewski of Northwestern University and was recorded before a live audience at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village.

(TOWN TALK AUDIO)

(JUDY) Anyone here who's old enough to remember the teleportation skills required for the Star Trek crew will know that the phrase beam me up, Scotty refers to a crew member having his or her molecular structure, deconstructed, and then beamed up to the Starship Enterprise where he or she is then reconstructed. Quantum physics may not be there yet. But the field is making great strides. 

(GEORGE) Quantum leaps, you might say…

(JUDY) YOU would say!

(GEORGE) Judy.. do you know how to accomplish a quantum leap?

(JUDY) No.  How, George?

 (GEORGE) You have to make like a photon and travel light.  (LAUGHTER AND GROANS FROM AUDIENCE)

\

 (GEORGE) We have a great speaker tonight who’ll tell us all about these advances. So let's get right to it. Mike Wasielewski is Claire Hamilton Hall Professor of Chemistry and applied physics at Northwestern and the director of the initiative for quantum information Research and Engineering, known by the acronym

(GEORGE AND JUDY IN UNISON) Inquire. 

(JUDY) And after Dr. Wasielewski shares his knowledge about how quantum computers and other quantum devices will radically change our lives. Inquire is exactly what we'll do.

(GEORGE) So, please welcome now, Dr. Mike Wasielewski.

(APPLAUSE)

(MIKE) Clearly, as George and Judy just mentioned it, it has really been in the Sci Fi regime for many, many decades at this point. But on the other hand, it's real. And the reality of it is being developed as we speak. And indeed, first of all, we have to really figure out what this really is. W

What it really is, it applies right now only to very, very, very small objects, atoms, molecules, parts of atoms, you know, particles, really teeny tiny little things on a sub nanometer scale. Okay, so a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. Okay? So really tiny, teeny, tiny things, not people beaming up to the Starship Enterprise. But nevertheless, some of the same concepts that one sees in the popular literature in the popular press really are the basis upon what we're thinking about.

(STAR TREK TRANSPORTER SOUND)

(GEORGE) OK, time out to explain a couple of basic things here.  In the quantum world, there’s something called superposition, the ability of a particle to be in different states at the same time. 

(SOUND EFFECT DICE)  

Imagine you’re in Las Vegas and someone gives you a miraculous pair of quantum dice and they are constantly shaking themselves up. They’re turning and spinning so fast you don’t know what numbers are up. That’s their quantum state.

(MIKE) And this is the magic of quantum computation and all quantum technologies, you're taking advantage of the fact that this object can actually be in a so-called superposition, it can be anywhere between up or down zero and one, etc. And so if you can actually use this, then you have incredible power.

(JUDY) There’s another thing that powers the quantum world…the phenomenon of entanglement, where the quantum behavior of one particle is mirrored in a second one.

(GEORGE) Hmmm..entanglement…sounds sexy!

(JUDY) You really can’t help yourself, can you, George!

(sound effect dice)

(GEORGE) So, back to my magic dice shaking themselves up.  I roll them out on the table. They come up one and one. Snake eyes.  I put them back in the quantum dice cup and roll them again. A pair of sixes. Boxcars. I keep rolling them over and over and every time, the two dice cubes come up with the same number of spots on each.  They are entangled. Now an experiment:  I get a second quantum dice cup and give one of the dies to a buddy who flies to Los Angeles.  

(jet plane sound)

We get on the phone with each other and I roll a four.  He rolls a four. I roll a five, he rolls a five. So, in the quantum world, distance doesn’t matter.  My buddy could be in a faraway galaxy and would still roll the same numbers are me. In the quantum world, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.

(JUDY) Entanglement has puzzled and bedeviled scientists for a long time.  Albert Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”

(MIKE) Albert Einstein absolutely hated this. He never through his entire late latter life could never reconcile this with his his own views of physics. And so basically, this is one of the central, mysterious things about quantum mechanics of the rules the quantum world as we know it. And the phrase goes that if you really think you understand quantum and quantum mechanics, you probably don't.

(GEORGE)  Almost one hundred years after the first theories of quantum mechanics were published, Science has begun to harness the power of the quantum world. Quantum computers can crunch data at speeds unheard of in conventional computing while using far less energy.

(MIKE) The dawn of AI is really going to mean, a lot more computational power is necessary, which is not so much obvious to a lot of people means a lot of more electricity is going to have to be used. And so basically, what quantum computing and quantum technology promises is the ability to do things on a scale that's almost unimaginable. And as a consequence, do it in a way that processors will require far less energy than then this particular technology today requires.

(GEORGE). Quantum computing is in a very early stage right now, using large devices that have to be cooled to about minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit.  Mike Wasielewski compares it to ENIAC, the first big computer developed just after World War II.  That used 20-thousand vacuum tubes and weighed 30 tons. Fast forward to now…

(MIKE) And here we are with a room full of equipment, a so called dilution refrigerator, which can get you to ultra cold temperatures. And, and two people working with this object. So quantum computing today is at a point that we were in 1945, with normal computers, so we have a long way to go to get them scaled down. So in other words, how do I go from the ENIAC to the iPhone? Okay. And so it took a long time, right? Hopefully, with quantum computing, it won't take us quite so long,

(JUDY) There’s a bit of a space race going on between the United States and China when it comes to quantum communications. The Chinese have sent signals between Earth and a satellite using quantum techniques.

(MIKE) quantum communications really had an explosive Renaissance after 2017 when the Chinese launched a satellite, which was able to communicate with the ground stations using entanglement of light particles, photons. Okay, so this, this, everybody got very nervous about this, and all of a sudden, lots of money showed up to do research.//Whenever you have a space-based event, that seems to attract attention in Washington.

(GEORGE) On the medical front, there’s the possibility that quantum sensors will enable early detection of disease electronically.  

(MIKE) For instance, you could do have molecular quantum sensors that could sit on a membrane and detect certain proteins that might be important in disease, you know, even detect the proteins respond, or the viruses responsible for COVID, for instance.

(JUDY). And with quantum science, researchers are doing artificial photosynthesis, the process that plants use to grow, employing light and air and nutrients. Someday, it may be possible to augment the rainforests and help recycle the carbon dioxide that’s causing climate change.

(MIKE) I started my career doing artificial photosynthesis. I am fully on board with that. 

There are other quantum processes in nature which are intriguing as well, which there are some evidence for like For instance, do you ever wonder why birds can fly north and south easily? In winter and summer? Well, it turns out that the, there's a protein in the birds’ eye, that actually does the same kind of process that you see in photosynthesis. And that those small, those electrons that are created are very sensitive to teeny tiny magnetic fields for the Earth's magnetic field. And so the, the bird can actually sense that and translate that into a direction. 

(JUDY)Wow. 

(MIKE) And so it's been shown that this is this is probably the mechanism of avian direction, magnetic compass, so to speak. And so this is pretty cool. 

(JUDY) It is cool.

(GEORGE)  I asked Dr. Wasielewski about the teething pains of early quantum computing. The quantum bits…or Qbits that these computers use…can be glitchy and full of errors.

(MIKE) Normal computers  have ways of correcting errors. And so consequently, error correction in quantum computing is a very big problem. And it's estimated that you might need as many as 10 fold more Qubits to actually do the error correction properly. So this keeps going out in scale. 

(JUDY)  I’m thinking ahead to teleportation.  You miss a few Qbits and your head is no longer attached.

(MIKE) Well, remember, remember that that, you know, your your, your physical body has at least a trillion atoms, if not more, and…

(JUDY) So many things to do are wrong, right? 

(MIKE) So many things could go wrong. Yes. So I don't think I don't think we're gonna see that anytime soon, 

(JUDY) Anytime soon.

(GEORGE) Well, yeah, we should, we should make clear that we're not talking about transporting matter.

(MIKE) Right. Right, exactly. I mean, I mean, you can, you know, you don't generally transport matter, your transport information. And so that's, that's really the name of the game.

(JUDY) What about writing computer programs In the future? I mean, it's for quantum computers. It's not like you can go to the App Store? 

(MIKE)No, no, actually, it turns out there there, there's a whole burgeoning field of quantum algorithm development that's ongoing, both in industry and academia. And there are a lot, many young people are going into that field in order to develop the strategies, which are quite different in many respects to develop the algorithms necessary to take maximum advantage of quantum computers. 

(GEORGE) Is part of that developing software to enable quantum computers to talk to plain old digital computers?

(MIKE) Yes, yeah. In fact, when the typical scenario one would have is, your classical computer will queue up the problem and then what needs to be quantum will be then downloaded into the quantum processor, and then you will fetch fish out the result, which will then be further processed or read out using a classical machine.

(GEORGE) Are you are you kind of going back to the early days of computing when people had to rent time on big mainframes? 

(MIKE) Without naming names, there are a lot of big corporations who started their their businesses in the computing world with that model. 

(GEORGE) We won't name it but its initials are IBM, right?

(LAUGHTER)

(MIKE) But, you know, if you think about it, though, today's technology requires these ultra low temperatures, largely all predicated on keeping a very small chip of superconducting Q bits extremely cold. And so one could imagine that this is never going to be in your iPhone, right? So that what you really would need to do is have a central facility that actually was able to provide the refrigeration capacity that you needed. In order to do this.

(JUDY) Let’s open it up to questions from the audience. Wait for the microphone, he’s about to pass it to you.

(QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE) Why does it take 100 years? For us to now have a quantum computer? What would be the enabling technology, in your opinion? Or what was historically the enabling technology? 

(MIKE) In other words, why didn't we do it earlier? What if, for example? Yeah, no, I mean, I think part of the problem was influential people didn't believe it was possible, like Albert Einstein, right? I think that that's what it comes down to influence the influence of people who are respected. And it can really put a showstopper on some of these things. So, you know, there's these 30 year gaps, because the original contention, where Einstein went nuts about this was 1935. So, you know, I think it's a people problem as much as it is a technical problem.

(JUDY) Okay, another queston, right here, wait for the microphone, thank you.

(QUESTION) Is there any chance that supercooling won’t be necessary in the future? 

(MIKE) I think I think there may be technologies where you don't need to cool things. And there are photonic technologies, in other words, just used to using light.

(QUESTION) Can you quantify how far behind the Chinese we actually are? 

(MIKE) It used to be a lot easier to do that than it is today, because information flow in and out of China is not as transparent as it once was. I think just from an investment standpoint, it's it's about a factor. It's about a factor of 10 on a yearly basis.

(GEORGE) Okay..one more time out here.  Global Data, a leading business analytics and information provider, says China has committed fifteen billion dollars to quantum computing over the next five years while the U.S. government has allocated four billion to quantum ventures. But it’s hard to get a handle on the exact amount of Chinese spending because they’re not very open about their budgets for quantum science.

(QUESTION) And how worried should we be about that? 

(MIKE) Well,I think we should worry about it. But I think I think a lot of this technology is still at the incipient stage. And so. And as a consequence, scientists do like to talk to each other. So as these events and Telluride suggest, and so I think maintaining communications with people in other countries is really critical to as a global effort, you know, getting this technology off the ground and being useful for everybody.

(JUDY) I'm curious if, and I know you probably don't want to do this, but imagine 25 years from now. How will this change our lives?

(MIKE) Well, I think the ability to process information at speeds that are exceed today's world by you know, millions of times is going to essentially let information processing creep into everything we do. I mean, whether we even you know, even if we for instance, think of the notion of maybe we will directly interface with some, some unnamed people are suggesting today through direct brain to to information source connection that could well happen I mean, that's not so far-fetched, actually. I think the I think what we're going to find is that it's not going to be just your refrigerators telling you what time of day it is, or you know, whether the temperature is too low or too high. It's going to be suggesting meal options and things of that nature based on what's in there. 

(JUDY) Will, it cook?

(MIKE) It might. 

(JUDY)  That's great. 

(MIKE) All you'll have to do is move it from the fridge to the oven, right? And this will take over so. So it'll be it'll be significant impact. But just from a practical standpoint, I think if the ability to sense disease states and to mitigate them, comes to the fore, just because we can actually do a superb job computing the properties of really big things, then I think medicine will have really significant breakthroughs in the next couple of decades based on it. And so we'll all live longer. Hey, live long and prosper.

(GEORGE) That's about all the time we have. Give a big hand to Dr. Mike Wasielewski for sharing his wisdom with us. (applause)

(JUDY) We want to thank our sponsors the Telluride Mountain village Owners’  Association and Alpine Bank. Thank you all for coming.  (applause)

(theme music)

(GEORGE). And a big thank you to our fine audio engineer, Colin Cassanova.  This has been a presentation of Telluride Science. The executive director is Mark ˚Kozak and Cindy Fusting is managing director. 

JUDY: Annie Carlson runs donor relations and Sara Friedberg is lodging and operations manager. For more information, to hear all our podcasts, and if you want to donate to the cause, go to telluride science-dot-o.r.g.  I’m Judy Muller.

JUDY: And I’m George Lewis, inviting you to join us next time on Science Straight Up.